Source of Pleasure

To those of us whose love of books is tactile – cherishing their feel, texture, smell – picking up a book with the stamp ‘Book Production War Economy Standard’ ought to come as a sharp disappointment. But Robert Gibbings’s Coming Down the Wye, published in the first year of those authorized economy standards agreed between the Publishers Association and the Ministry of Supply in January 1942, seems only lightly scathed by the official restrictions (on such things as type-to-page ratio, maximum type size and minimum words per page).

Picking it off the shelf in a charity shop in Ludlow I immediately enjoyed the feel of the book and the look of the author’s sharply etched black-and-white wood engravings. Clearly the rules on using thin boards and inferior paper had not yet begun to bite – or the publishers, Dent, were sailing close to the wind. (The paper shortage was said to be caused by the fact that most of the paper used in the British book trade was made from esparto grass, imported from North Africa, then under French colonial control.) In its meanders and loops as digressive as the River Wye itself, Coming Down the Wye is a charming excursion through topography, natural history, myth and legend. It begins at the source of the Wye in the Cambrian mountains of mid-Wales, where the waters start to coalesce in a cleft of Pumlumon Fawr (in English Plynlimon). Gibbings then takes us, well, almost to the end of the 155-mile river. Blithely pre-empting the reader’s expectation that he will follow the Wye right to its mouth in the Severn Estuary at Chepstow, he suddenly stops, halfway through the book, at Ross-on-Wye and takes a lift back to Llangurig in Montgomeryshire. There he rents a cottage in an idyllic spot that enables him to observe and draw local nature. By this time, though, we are gladly in his hands and don’t mind at all. Not for him the tottering haycart of overloaded prose that so often characterizes current nature writing. Gibbings is good at short, sharp, clear descriptions. At the source of the Wye, for example, he looks out across the Welsh mountains to Cader Idris:

Under my feet the turf is soft and warm, and the rippling grass is smooth as a tiger’s flanks. There are wide stretches of hillside where club mosses, like miniature cypress and fir trees, enrich the texture of the carpet. Though no more than a few inches high they are relatives of the great sixty-foot branchless trees which grew in the tropic climate of these islands millions of years before man appeared upon the earth and which in their decay formed the seams of coal now so helpful to his existence.

Having been shot through the throat in Gallipoli in 1915, then invalided out of the army in 1918, Gibbings had earned his 1941 war time idyll in rural Wales. Born in Ireland in 1889, son of a Church of Ireland clergyman who was later a Canon of Cork Cathedral, Gibbings was a large man with a twinkle in his eye and a sense of joie de vivre that is hinted at in many of his anecdotes. He had a colourful life after he abandoned law studies to attend the Slade and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he learned wood engraving. He took over the famous Golden Cockerel Press in 1924 as its director and book designer, illustrating many books and giving commissions to John Nash, Eric Ravilious, Eric Gill and others. Gill’s editions of The Canterbury Tales and The Four Gospels were among the most outstanding works of the Press. A visit to Germany in the late 1920s turned Gibbings into a naturist and he travelled to Tahiti, the West Indies and the Red Sea. Eventually he became a lecturer in book production at Reading University. If Coming Down the Wye is digressive, its predecessor, the 1940 bestseller Sweet Thames Run Softly was even more so. It barely gets as far from its source as Chelsea Reach, and in it Gibbings only remembers to talk directly about the river occasionally, so we must be grateful for at least some focus on the Wye’s wayward progress. (There would be another river book ten years later, Coming Down the Seine, as digressive as its predecessors.) In a pub at Rhayader, still in the upper reaches of the Wye, Gibbings meets the first of many ‘characters’ encountered in licensed premises and on riverbanks, who flew to him like moths to flame. T his time it is ‘’Iggs’, a 73-year-old army veteran, who’d served in Hyderabad in 1889. ‘Did you know’, he asks Gibbings, ‘that there’s only two straight streets in Oxford, and that’s an edicated city? But give me travel for edication. You and me ’as travelled. We’re edicated.’ Coming Down the Wye is dedicated to another Montgomeryshire character, Dai Rees from Llangurig, where Gibbings returned to live while writing the book. Encountered in the Black Lion pub in the town, Dai has a friend called Tom Thomas who keeps a pedigree 18-hundredweight Hereford bull. Tom has only to lift his finger for the massive beast to come and offer the ring in its nose to his master and follow him meekly to his stall. ‘Tom could lie down in front of that bull and it would lick him all over, like a dog.’ Gibbings is in his element in this boozy masculine rural company. Women tend to figure in his narrative in their poetic or legendary roles, one of them a mermaid of the River Lugg, a tributary of the Wye, who was of course barred from the local church, as mermaids must be, but who made her home in one of the church bells that had fallen into the river. Unhappy with this state of affairs, the locals harnessed a team of twelve white heifers to the bell in an attempt to tug her out. With great difficulty the bell was hauled from the water to reveal the mermaid fast asleep inside, but she was accidentally woken by a shout from one of the team of drovers doing the pulling and sprang back into the river, taking the bell with her. ‘It all happened a long time ago, but the folks of Marden have never got their bell back. They say that sometimes it may still be heard ringing in a deep clear pool.’ At another stretch of water, the lake of Llangorse, five miles in circumference, there is another story of bells. Gibbings quotes a seventeenth-century manuscript description of this ‘great Poole’ where once stood ‘a faire citie which was swallowed up in an Earthquake and resigned her stone walles into this deep and broad water, being stored most richly with fish in such abundance as is uncredible’. The modern legend is that when the lake is rough the buried church bells can be heard ringing under the water. Gibbings accosts a lakeside dweller and asks him if this is true. ‘Bunkum!’ he replies. He puts two further questions about the lake’s supposedly miraculous properties and receives the same answer. As Gibbings travels along the Wye he finds that he is constantly taken for a clergyman:

I suppose it’s the beard. Every second Welshman that I met told me that I reminded him of his grandfather, who was a great preacher, or of somebody else that afterwards became a bishop or even higher. I think the chief difference between me and an archbishop is that the archbishop is always conscious of sin and I rarely am. That surely can’t be due to difference of opportunity.

That hedonistic spirit is what animates this book and makes it so life-enhancing. And we would not be without all those stories and narrative loops and meanders. Like Gerald of Wales, whose twelfth- century Journey through Wales is punctuated with phrases like ‘another thing which is worth recording’, Gibbings peppers his travelogue with ‘I cannot help mentioning’ as the latest legend, human encounter, wildlife observation, historical snippet or autobiographical musing pulls him gently to one side.

The barbed wire and fences that he starts to stumble over as the upper reaches of the Wye are left behind are an affliction to this free spirit: ‘Some of the fences might have been international boundaries. Indeed, I have crossed from France into Spain with far greater ease than I negotiated some of the barriers between riverside properties.’ The state of the Wye today, polluted by the ooze of effluents from proliferating chicken sheds that have drastically reduced the river’s salmon population, is too horrible to contemplate, which makes Gibbings’s evocation of the river in the 1940s so attractive. In the end his sense of delight in the visible world becomes ours:

There is no shortage of natural phenomena to wonder at beside a river. Every stone has a history that makes the grandest item in Debrett look silly. Every leaf, from its unfolding to its fall, is a seasonal repetition of a phantasmagoria of cellular activity more weird and incomprehensible than our wildest imaginings.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Nicholas Murray 2026